Next time your Wiimote accidentally gets thrown into your LCD TV, don't fret too much—chemicals found in the broken TV sets could be used to fight infections in the human body.

The welcome news has come from research undertaken by the University of York in England, which found that the polyvinyl-alcohol, or PVA, can actually fight off viruses and infections, either as medicine or a cleaning agent for homes. A professor in the Department of Chemistry, Dr Andrew Hunt, said that by "heating then cooling the PVA and then dehydrating it with ethanol we can produce a high surface area mesoporous material that has great potential for use in biomedicine."

It's also good news for the environment, with the PVA turning into a weird form of a byproduct from the broken TV set, almost like the skin off a dead cow. There'll inevitably be many bureaucratic hoops to jump through before anything is swallowed by a human, or put on the shelves of supermarkets promising a hygienic kitchen table, but the university is hopeful the following tests will deem the chemicals as being safe enough by these alternative uses. [GizMag]
Image Credit: Velkr0